


Odds & Ends: Homestuck drabbles

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Alternia, Body Horror, Caretaking, Child Death, Comfort Sex, Dialogue, Fix-it version of The Alternian Invasion, Grubs, Helmstrolls, Red Seadwellers, Sex Pollen, Tiny!Trolls, Unplanned Pregnancy, Volta, Xeno, bee jokes, drones, noncon, troll!John
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:28:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2613368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holding cell for lazy bunnies and hit-and-run muses, so far mostly of the "what if" worldbuilding kind. Inquire within should something take your fancy and you wish to continue it. (The answer is yes, have at it.)</p><p>Chapter 1 (Karkat): What if the Alternian military is based on going to you duty with your lusus?<br/>Chapter 2 (Karkat re: Gamzee): The Shitty Tragic Truth about Faygo and Highblood Insanity<br/>Chapter 3 (Meenah POV): Regarding The True Nature of Trolls (Version 1)<br/>Chapter 4 (Dolorosa POV): Regarding The True Nature of Trolls (Version 2)<br/>Chapter 5: The Secret Life of Drones<br/>Chapter 6 (Sollux/?, Aradia/Sollux): Strange Orchid (The only explicit chapter so far)<br/>Chapter 7 (John & Karkat) Troll!John has issues adjusting. Karkat is there to tenderly tell him he's stupid.<br/>Chapter 8 (Jade & Karkat) Tiny Trolls Invade<br/>Chapter 9: (OCs) How to Pill a Helmstroll</p><p>Chapter 10: How Signless & Young Jade Harley Saved Us All (AU, OC POV)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Alternian Militiary is Based on Serving with Your Lusus

The truth of the matter is, it’s not your blood that dooms you. It’s your lusus.

When the drones come to escort you to your adult evaluation and posting, you know that you won’t be able to kill CrabDad. You already know that he won’t be able to leave you. The two of you will be assigned together, and adult duties are assigned by the lusus’s type. You will be amphibious assault. It’s the purpose for which CrabDad’s kind were bred. But you are a landdweller and you cannot breathe where half your duties will lie. Failure means death. Perhaps not instantly, but soon enough.

You know that there are trolls that make it to Ascension without their lusus, and they will be evaluated on their own. Many will be the worse off for it. Sollux will doubtless be conscripted to the helm until his brain bleeds out or he dies of boredom fixing the network for his fellow conscripts. His lusus will be left to find another freshly Emerged psionic grub.

You know Vriska’s SpiderMom will be culled. Vriska will probably be assigned to do it. If the massive arachnid was smaller and still able to travel to the caverns, she might have gotten a pass to start another grub, but at her size Vriska is likely her eighth and final wriggler. You know that they like their mindrapists to be mean, used to killing and justifying, and hunting for your lusus for so long? Well, Vriska is exactly what they want her to be. You kind of hope at least some of the adults that thought that up choke on it.

Tavros might be culled for infirmary, but you doubt it. Psionics and berserk highbloods are the most impressive forms of an invasion force, but animal speakers are far, far more efficient. When insects devour and taint food and flesh and every bit of native wildlife is against them, no matter how staunch a will they bear, a native defense force can only last so long.

You hope Terezi’s lusus hatches before Ascension.


	2. The Shitty Tragic Truth about Faygo and Highblood Insanity

You turn the cooktop device off and tip the cluckbeast broth into two bowls, rinse the pot and set it to dry. You put the bowls on a tray with two spoons, two glasses of water, two disposable cleaning wipes. You carry it all into the main block and set the tray on a table by the pile. It’s been a good night so far. Gamzee recognizes you.

It’s Feferi’s brave new world and you don’t have to worry about getting culled for your blood. Or your ancestor. Or your radical opinions. You don’t have to worry about running or hiding or how worried Gamzee would be when you couldn’t get to a safe spot to send him a message for nights or weeks or perigees. It’s a brave new world empty of the triumph you thought you’d feel with the spine of the Condesce’s Empire forever broken, because the old world had one last thing to take from you.

You help Gamzee eat his soup. He’s slow and his hands tremble, but you don’t rush him, you force yourself to live in the moment, to savor the feel of his hands and the smell of his paint and that stupid irreplaceable combination of unwashed clown and bashful pale pheromones, just as you do every night, every moment you can, because as bad as it is now, it will only get worse. He won’t be recovering.

You wish that you were a little taller, had longer arms, so that you could sit behind him and hold the bowl so he could just take little sips. So you could cradle him as he falls backward down the puberty scale from his pitiful not-quite-adult growth to an adult-shaped grub that needs someone to feed him and clean him and, somenight, turn him so he doesn’t get pressure sores. Still, you manage to get most of the bowl into him, some of the water, and you wipe up the spills and fix his paint with a careful finger and carefully keep your eyes dry and he smiles at you, one side rising higher than the other. “Besth Frienn,” he manages. And he lifts his hand, slowly, slowly, slowly, and places it on your head and you can feel the trembling against your horns. You put your hands on top of it and bow your head so he can’t see you cry. You are pale and wish that you could die of it.

You always thought you’d die young. Culled or dead of age, compared to an indigo’s natural lifespan you are meteor bright, as short-lived as a shooting star. But you are not dead and you won’t be culled and Feferi sits not on a throne but at the head of a table of elected delegates and across Alternia, this scene that you pace out each night with your moirail is repeated in tens of thousands of hives. In some of those hives, tonight is the last night. Perhaps the pneumonia has set in, or the combination of dysphagia and an inability to cough, and they are drowning. Perhaps the tremors and ataxia have set in so badly that they are ending it on their own terms, before it gets worse. Perhaps it is only the first night that they laugh uncontrollably, or that their speech slurs no matter their care, or they were unable to sleep, or panic stricken, or hallucinated for the first time. Perhaps it is only the first night that they do not recognize a partner. Dementia is the last stage.

It’s not a worm, or a fungus, or a protozoan, or a bacterium. It’s not even a virus. It’s not _alive_. So how can something so small be taking away your pale beloved? How many centuries ago did it start and how could no one have ever noticed?

It was always an open secret how Faygo was colored and flavored. What wasn’t so obvious to those outside the comforting dark of the Circus Tent was what it meant to devotees. What was causing the insanity and fits and horrible, uncontrolled laughter, generation after generation. The Circus is Family. Family doesn’t let go. In every bottle of Faygo is a little bit of one who went before. Until the entire supply is riddled with rogue prions and every devotee riddled with the eventual delusions and death.

Inside your moirail, innumerable tiny proteins are unfolding and refolding and unraveling him. There is nothing you can do, no one with whom you can bargain.

You tilt your head back up and smile. He smiles back, a tick flexing until his teeth are utterly bared and he draws his hand back to wrap himself with both arms to try to contain his shivers. You wrap him in blankets and you wait. There is nothing else you can do.

Behind you, your soup grows cold.


	3. Version 1: Regarding the True Nature of “Trolls”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Game Meenah POV

So you might have gone a boat overboard with Rufioh. Just a boat. Okay, maybe an ocean-going starship carrier. You, Meenah Peixes, are so thoroughly fucked that you’ve entirely wrecked your ship.

You might have decided to give the whole pitch crush thing a quickie and Rufioh was conchvenient and smug enough to be a good stand-in for the old bucket list, but you definnyatly failed to think this through. One perigees’ long game of chicken-of-the-sea later, you’re both up the duff. Knocked up. Bun in the bunghole. Floundered with fecundity. Spawning.

Cod are you saury.

You’d like to sink that even in this, you’re still betta at it than Rufioh, but the evening sickness makes it hard to stay agloat. Okay, you’re both fat as houseboats, but _you_ make it work. Mr. Handlebars is still trying to clampensate for the sea change to his center of gravidy.

At first it might have made you a boat uneasy, it _is_ a parasitic infection after eel, but you got the “Yes Your Bodies Are Quite Definitely Incubating Indigenous Young” from Porrim’s straight-laced mini-me, so whatever. Cronus’s obnoxious mini-me can’t help but laugh every time he sees one of you. Rufioh can fend for himself, but the next time mini-violet gets within arm’s reach, you’re going to smelt the sprat one. Worse if he calls you a wwhale again. Guppy’s a total basshole. Still, when you get back your fighting trim, a pitch dalliance may be in order. He’s a frivolously finned sarcastic fringehead, and he’d look shella hilarious bloated with _your_ spawn.

The next perigees trickle by slow as the tide changing in the kind of marsh where gartels dump bodies, and stink about as much. The laying’s no fun, but hey, it’s over, that mess of an egg each ain’t yours to scramble after. The rest of them gawkers can hoe their own roe. Except that you never manage to fully extract yourself. This whole brooding thing has left you otolith.

You can admit it, both the grubs are cute little shrimps. They’re just, kind of, well, _stupid_. Dumb as a box of clams. You don’t expect them to be reading and slamming from the egg, but they don’t teem to learn, not much anyways. They carp everywhere. They don’t respond to their names. They don’t make noises that even sound like they’re _frying_ to copy language. They’ll whine for food and follow you, or anyone with bait, but they just don’t teem like _reel people_. John Human is a passable grub-tender, and surprisingly patient, not that you’ve noticed, reelly. Okay, so you spent four and a half perigees towing the blue one around in your belowdecks, you’d hurt anyone that messed up the little barnacle after all that.

Porrim’s mini-me and her human shadow look concerned. Porrim looks reel shifty. You track her for a few evenings waiting for the bilgewater to spill out, until you’ve about haddock. You’re going to wrassel her to the ground on this if you have to.

It’s Rufioh’s mini-me that first sticks his triggerfish on it. “They, ah, act like animals? They seem happy enough, but I can hear them? And they listen to me? And I usually can’t hear people, not trolls or human ones anyways...” Stutter aside, Rufioh’s mini-me is now bigger and badder than he is. You kind of regret going for the original flavor when 2.0 has aged so swell. Meh. There’s still time.

Aranea’s mini-me looks disgusted. “I can’t even reach ‘em, I think you fucked up the slurry-thing.”

Porrim still looks shifty and she’s edging out of the room. Frigate discretion, like you’ll let her.

“Hey, snook-y, don’t be a spookfish, let’s hear the rest of it.” You’ll hake her if you have to.

She demurs. Shuck this. You rattle her and demand to know what’s wrong with your stowaway. And **_dam_**. You never would have guessed. From their shell-shocked faces, no one else would have. John Human holds your limpet and looks utterly crushed.

Your grub, that uncomfortable passenger from your freighter-sized barge belly is an _animal_. Rufioh’s is an animal. Every troll you’ve ever met? You? You’re all just parasites in bipedal hosts with nifty opposable thumbs and a range of semi-compatible psionics. It makes the whole hemospectrum utterly laughable. It makes the whole victory over the Game utterly absurd. You laugh because you can’t kelp yourself, and you double over, ‘cause you can’t stop.

You can incubate host offspring as long as you pike, absent mothergrub-be-dammed. You don’t have the necessary conditions to reproduce _trolls_. What you do have is a potentially renewable source of hosts when the warmer ones start keeling over. You could all live forever. Or at least until the inbreeding and time make you crayfish crazy.


	4. Version 2: Regarding the True Nature of “Trolls”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dolorosa POV

You can’t have been the first to notice the red grub. As a wriggler, barring wounds, he might have passed for a rust or a brown, as an adult, covering his eyes, the same, but grubs show their blood colors all along their bodies. This one is fat and healthy and utterly illegal. There are certain mandates in the caverns. You sort the grubs by color to different brooding caverns, to different lineages of your young. Certain shades not officially on the spectrum, but rather between other shades, are allowed, but red grubs are completely taboo.

Red grubs are a throwback to the time before your species completed the conquest of your host bodies. Red grubs are immune to the infestation, and therefore to be culled whenever found. He’s the first red in two hundred sweeps. You suppose that it must be a very rare recessive trait now, one ages long project, almost complete. You try to put it out of your mind.

Still, you keep returning to it. You wonder if the host bodies have any native intelligence. You wonder if when you argue with yourself over this very issue, _you_ are taking both sides, or if somewhere under your awareness, your host is trying to shrug free of your influence. Or perhaps _you_ are the host, and the invader has long since died. You wonder if it matters which one you are. You go back for him.

You leave the caverns.

You start everything all over again, and you can’t bring yourself to regret it, even when it ends badly. You know the truth. And he lived a free troll. The hosts, the riders, you are all of one culture, one people, for all that half of them are enslaved within their own minds, and a further portion enslaved within castes. You all come from the same caverns. You are all _trolls_.

(Psi _does_ argue with his selves, and it doesn’t matter which is originally the host, and which the rider, because they are inextricably linked now, closer than broodbrothers, incapable of discerning the origin of either personality. You wonder if he, they, are the next step. Symbiosis.)


	5. The Secret Life of Drones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The schoolfeeds never prepared you to be a slurry drone. They told you about a jade’s proper place in the order of things. They told you to respect your betters and to serve the Empire. They told you of your duty to keep the gene pool both diverse and pristine, that everyone must contribute their best and that the worst must be weeded out. They told you a lot of things and you swallowed most of it down and only choked a little, and only in the privacy of your mind.
> 
> Amalgamation of several prompts and fanons.

Male Jades might become drones during second pupation, but it’s not immediate. It’s not natural. It’s not easy. It’s not something you know happens until it’s happening to you.

First there were classes, and training, and inculcation. They give you mutant grubs, each clearly feeble. Yours has only three legs, the first two on the right and the first on the left, and it can’t seem to move its hindquarters. It smiles at you and blows spit bubbles and purrs. There are some with no horns, or other parts missing or deformed. Most are clearly congenital issues. One has a face on its back, like it should have been twins and instead is just a grub with a massive tumor. A few have ingrown horns or teeth. Yours has scars where its missing legs ought to be, and you think that it was just unlucky. Not unlucky to be hatched, but unlucky subsequent to that.

You’re told that you will be graded on their survival, that you must do what you can to foster a healthy population of future trolls. One of your classmates kills theirs the first night. They take him away. It’s only perigees later, when the inculcation and your second and final pupation are in their end stages, that you realize that that was all they needed to know. You can’t have drones sympathizing with the population they police.

Your grub lasts six perigees, a perigee longer than anyone else’s, though you suspect that was only because you never accepted any “help” with watching it while you did something else, and for the past perigee there was no one else left . Some of your classmates “helped” each other rid themselves of their grubs, and even now you’re not entirely sure which did it to sabotage and which did it for custodians who couldn’t. In the privacy of your mind, your last privacy, you wonder if letting Fraest die early would have been a mercy to the both of you.

You shouldn’t have named it.

Even thinking that name makes your limbs twitch, and you’re trying to check on a dead grub. Your grasping appendages are futilely clutching and releasing with the need to feed a creature that no longer exists. Your auditory canals, now naked of external flaps, are straining to hear one now dead. You force yourself to stop. If you fall off the shelf of rock you’re perched on, you won’t be able to lever yourself back up. Your armor plates are in a between stage and you might just shatter. You wonder if it makes a difference, but you don’t want to die, even if this is a parody of existence. You wonder if you’ll later regret not trying now when it might have been easily accomplished. A sharp rock in one of your soft parts… all you’d have to do is fall on it. You wonder if the thing you’re becoming will erase the person you were, the person you are. You wonder if you’ll notice when it happens.

You remember your first, your only slurry donation, and you remember how terrifying the drone was. You remember trembling when you proffered the filled buckets and stepped back to stand by your matesprit, soon to ship out, unlikely to be seen again. You should not miss Stharp Patone so much, you have plenty of pain but no lust, why would you pine for your matesprit and not someone to pap your brow? You have no moirail. Now you will never have a moirail. Stharp was all you had.

You wonder, if you could have seen the drone before his final pupation, would you have recognized him? It? Stharp’s auspistice was a male jade a sweep older than you. Would you recognize Kaidrn now? Was that Kaidrn? You only met him once. But this is the only brooding cavern on this continent, so he must be here. All the male jades must be here. Would he even have recognized his ash leaf?

The schoolfeeds never prepared you to be a slurry drone. They told you about a jade’s proper place in the order of things. They told you to respect your betters and to serve the Empire. They told you of your duty to keep the gene pool both diverse and pristine, that everyone must contribute their best and that the worst must be weeded out. They told you a lot of things and you swallowed most of it down and only choked a little, and only in the privacy of your mind.

Second pupation hit you like a berserker in the throes of Mirth, that one final step toward a thwarted adulthood held off by weekly injections until they judged you ready and then catapulted you into the change with new injections, ones that make your body surge and crumple and fold and fill in terrible ways.

First you got lethargic, aches all over, and your eyes dimmed until all that was left were shadows. Then your torso and abdomen started to grow, armor growing in after, limbs too slow at keeping up, and you could crawl a bit, but are now utterly at the mercy of whatever might come your way. An older jade clucks her tongue and tells another that it’s the delay, that they should have culled your grub earlier because she’s not sure if you’ll make the transition now. She doesn’t speak to you.

One of your jade sisters, Rrossa from your sweep, feeds you, feeds the fearsome beast that your body is becoming without your permission, pets your temples and the thick plates of your face, businesslike, but not unkind, like the moirail you’ll never have now, and you have a moment of clarity in your fogged doom.

There but for the grace of the Terrors, go us all. You are the dead grubs, and the doomed grubs, and the ravenous grubs still feeding, and the girl-woman feeding a helpless, monstrous beast somewhere in the depths of the brooding caverns. She is the terrible beast, the same color, a different side of the mirror.

She is Fraest, and Stubby, and NoHorn, and NoName, and GrubLoaf I, and GrubLoaf II, and all the other two hundred odd lesson grubs for this sweep, all the other infirm or forsaken grubs that will never be wrigglers, never be trolls, never be remembered by anyone but jades. You wonder if some of her sweepmates are even now becoming Mothergrubs. Is that the other half of this secret? Or is this horrible enough to be complete on its own? Or is the other half of the horror how easily you and all your classmates are becoming monsters, like a Terror slept inside you all this time and you were only its mask.

It’s a good thing (or is it?) that the surges of growth change your squawkpipes enough to disguise your daymare cries, or they would cull you even now. Rrossa comes to you anyhow, and when your squawkpipes grow back in, deeper, more rigid, your voice is monotonous when you ask her why. She doesn’t answer, not aloud, but she brushes a hand through where your hair once was, and your eyes have cleared enough to see the unhappy cast to her face. She feeds you, holds yet another cylinder of fluid to your mouthplates, cool and salty and sweet and somehow very necessary, your hideous body assures you. You drink it down without thought, and she holds the next without complaint. She even washes the stone under your hindquarters, where the inevitable waste accumulates. You wonder if she did the same for any of your classmates, and how long ago. You have lost track of time. Have you been stewing in the juices of your pupation for weeks now, or only nights? Has it been perigees or sweeps?

You test the thought of rolling off the stone and cracking your carapace and feel some pushback from the newly installed collarworm, one part GPS, tracking, and communications, one part monitoring and modification. Your throat plates are growing around it and soon it will be concealed from view, latched into your spine and feeding without disturbance from your own circulatory system. You wonder if you will ever forget it’s there, ever be erased enough to not mind, not care, not deviate in the least from your mission.

You wonder if drones wield their culling forks extravagantly because the most perversely kind thing they can offer is a release from an existence they can’t exit. No pushback. The collar doesn’t care about philosophy. The collar doesn’t care who you cull or why.

The endless daymare stretch of your pupation ends and your eyes clear up and your limbs catch up and your armor hardens, strong and flexible enough to avoid being brittle. They give you your orders and your weapon and send you out. Somewhere between your modified mind and the worm are little spots of awareness, stars and black holes within the black that is Alternia. You know where all your brothers are.

You perform your duties for a while, and it goes well enough your first season. No one refuses to proffer their bucket, no one tries to kick it over, and you just show up and intimidate and ferry off the full vessels. You brandish your fork a few times to scare off a few would be suicidal heroics, and you don’t have to cull anyone. It goes as well as such things can, and you don’t think about all the slurry you transport, how you’re making grubs and some of them will be considered unfit. You don’t think about how you’re a cog in a clockwork Terror.

You may give the kids a bit more time than is strictly necessary, but your duties don’t stipulate a duration before “failure to provide genetic material in reasonable timeframe” becomes a cullable offense. That’s left at your discretion, and according to your discretion, it’s wasteful to cull potential genetic donors before they have a chance to be practiced about efficiency. You don’t bother to tell anyone that you think it’s stupid to cull kids when they have a bit of performance anxiety over the whole thing. The collarworm doesn’t object, so either someone agrees, or they just don’t care. You are careful not to think about the first option, but it warms your mind with an unwarranted hope nonetheless.

You scape by your first season without culling anyone, though not without witnessing plenty of death, and if there are a few jokes, well, you don’t care. Drone jokes tend to be pretty stupid. The punchline is usually “and then I culled them”.

You don’t know if it’s just the drones in your territory, if something about you is off, or if everyone’s still too scared to say what they really think. You’ve learned to fly fast to make up the time you spend being a bit extra patient at all your stops. You’ve learned to watch which among the other drones are quick to cull, or slow to communicate successful collections, which tend to fall for bluffs, which tend to fall for bluffs and subsequently seem too canny for it to be anything but faked.

You still can’t tell most of your brothers apart except by their communication tags.

During your second season, you hit an impasse on your personal crusade to scrape by without having to cull anyone. You’ve employed all the tricks you learned last season, the extra slow dawdling pace at the final approach that makes the kids panic just a bit less, the intimidation and pheromone spray when someone tries to be heroic and fight you off, the stretching all definitions of “full pail” when someone turns in a piddling amount. Still, you’re pretty sure you’re about to break your self-imposed vow, and you don’t think you really mind. Some trolls are just really asking for it.

The green, one Ytamma Seruss, nine sweeps, riflekind, is tall but hunched and scared. The blue, one Latrul Carumi, nine and a half sweeps, scythekind, is sharp and smirking. They both have off planet vocational assignments starting next week.

Carumi grandly waves her arm at her own two buckets and tosses her “kismesis” under the public transportation beetle gleefully, divulging that not only does “Seruuuss” not have a “maaatesprit” bucket but that she suspects that her bucket will fail “inspeeection”, “such a shaaame”.

You don’t bother to argue that one bucket is actually quite sufficient. You think it’s stupid that the Empire officially stipulates two when trolls don’t even need a registered exception to proffer one to avoid culling, so long as it is accepted. Of course, accepted means it was acceptable, and acceptable depends on the drone, so it’s not a bad idea to have a bit of redundancy. You suspect that someone just thinks it’s funny to panic the newbies, but considering how many suicides you’ve witnessed at this point, you’re thoroughly sick of it, though there’s nothing you can think of to do about it. The Empire doesn’t employ you to think.

You take the buckets. You test the buckets. The blue’s both pass, barely. The pheromone mix in the red bucket is fine, slurry two nights old but stable. Two trolls willingly contributed to it, there’s plenty of it, there’s nothing objectionable about it but the donor. The pitch bucket’s not, strictly speaking, a cullable failure, but the pheromones underline your suspicions about what exactly is going on. There’s hatred here, but not the mating fondness kind. The third bucket, Seruss’s bucket, is clearly poisoned, and not even subtly. What’s not so clear is proof of who did it or why. She looks sick and terrified as you deliver your verdict regarding the treason that has been performed. Carumi is still smirking when you fork her. Seruss is still pale and terrified when you turn back.

You dump the poisoned bucket on the body, intone something about two buckets, accepted from Ytamma Seruss, and reel off the date, time, and transaction confirmation number. Seruss still looks stunned as you leave. You doubt that she will remember the confirmation number. You update your records and upload them to the central database so no one else accidently forks her for non-participation. There is little likelihood that she will shoot you from behind. You register the culling as justified under the treasonous act of having attempted to poison a Mothergrub, push it to the central database and check off the extra sections to indicate that her matesprit was not involved. Who knows whose stupid idea the poison was, but having the bad taste to flush a jerk is not a cullable offense.

It’s the first time you enjoy a forking. You try not to get too used to it.

Outside slurry season again, you assist with whatever projects are assigned to the drones. Some are on carpentry duty for lusii and their latest charges, some work within the caverns scrapping out new rooms or assisting the sisters with other tasks.

You’re assigned building your first season off, and grub feeding your second. The first is not bad, it’s nice to make something instead of endless rounds of terror and slurry-schlepping, though some of the drones have gone sour over the sweeps and forecast how each inhabitant will meet their ends. You’re the newbie on your crew and you hear your first Mothergrub joke.

The second season off is better and worse in some ways. The seething mass of grubs makes you both somehow sick and elated, and you don’t know why. You like to see them eating, like to see them eating what you brought them. You become more and more selective over what animals are healthy enough to be consumed, though frankly, they’d eat anything.

Sweeps pass. Rrossa gains her adult title. In slurry season, you try to be patient, try to be judicious. Management updates your protocols. Your idea of mercy fluxes with how freshly they’ve been uploaded. The waste and inefficiency of it hurts. You start to platonically hate trolls for being so stingy with their slurry. Where will your grubs come from if they don’t get on with it? You force yourself not to hurry, because hurrying won’t bring the end of slurry season any faster. You think you dream of grubs during the day, but you’re also pretty sure that drones don’t dream.

Slurry season always ends eventually, and you return to your hunting duties and bring your kills almost exclusively to The Dolorosa. She has the best rates of successful first pupation in all the caverns. There’s envy, but they assign her larger and larger rooms until no one envies her. You kill you first skywhale. You have to bribe your brothers to help you carve it up and bring it to the caverns. Everyone feasts that night. No one else notices who downed it and you don’t growl at all your brothers and sisters eating the grubs’ food, despite the temptation. No more skywhales.

Sweeps pass and a quarter of your sweepmates have been decommissioned through accidents or the occasional decree, and you’re among the older but not oldest of the drones. One night you find The Dolorosa alone with a grub in her arms. She starts and looks up at you. There’s an involuntary motion as if to hide it. You can’t tell what color it is, maybe indigo? Or maybe rust, you can’t see all the colors the sisters can, and reds just look dark to you.

You drop your kill at her feet and kneel before her so she recognizes you. She smiles, if sadly, and pats your head once. No one else has touched you since you were someone else. You rise and leave. You have time for another hunt before sunrise and one hoofbeast is enough to feed this cavern lightly, but not to keep the grubs content.

You hear her dismembering the carcass behind you. You hear the squeak and chirp of the grub. It sounds familiar. Not just familiar from the ages of grubs you’ve seen, but something about the tone? As if it feels utterly safe and is chirping out its contentment? A name drifts through your mind. Fristt? Frayst?

The collarworm spasms and you cough. You think for a moment about some of the other drones who coughed for a few nights before they were gone. You wonder if this means you’re going where they went. There’s something about that thought, a darkened doorway you can’t see through. There’s something triumphant and hopeful and also sad? But there’s a context you’re missing. Sometimes the updates overwrite things.

When you get back, the sun is rising and The Dolorosa is gone. You dismember the carcass for the squeaking mass of grubs, the first carcass gnawed to the bones now, and scatter it so they all have a chance. The Dolorosa should still be on duty, there’s no one else to be sure that daytime predators don’t get in, but you don’t report her. Your cough is worse. You watch the grubs all day. There’s a fight and two are scratched. One is subsequently bitten enough that it dies, remains as yet uneaten with two hoofbeasts previously provided. The other crawls to you and you set it in The Dolorosa’s chair. Within a few hours, it’s scabbed over enough to be lowered back down.

The next night you hunt and feed the grubs and cough. During the day, you watch them again. No fights. None die.

The third night you make it back to the caverns with your kill but can’t quite stand again to leave. The grubs are still hungry. No one else will check on them until tomorrow night when The Dolorosa’s rotation ends, not unless you report her. You lean back on the wall to rest, cough some more.

The grubs surge forward to explore your feet. You feel a dim pressure. There’s a splash of jade ichor on the floor and it disappears as the mass of grubs cover it. You realize they’re eating it, eating you, but it doesn’t hurt and they’re hungry because you only went out once tonight and that’s not enough.

Something in your chestplates aches in a way that feels right. The collarworm shifts and spasms and you can’t breathe. You cough and cough and finally set your claws in and rip the worm out, a rain of jade streaking down your torso, the cavern darkening as your sight fades.

The grubs squeak and shift and you very carefully set your arm back down, find a clear spot and smash the worm and rest your taloned hand sharp edges down. You tilt your head back against the wall and settle so that you don’t fall on the grubs when your control is gone. You send a message on delay to the rota to be sure someone comes tomorrow night. When you finish bleeding out, there’s no one there to notice.


	6. Strange Orchid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternia’s fauna is aggressive. So is its flora. Aggressive is not the same as malevolent. 
> 
> Dubcon/noncon for manipulative flowers doing what evolution made them good at doing. No plant tentacles. Some cross-quadrant very consensual hurt/comfort smut and speculation on Alternia’s co-evolved plantlife. (This chapter is basically one long bee-joke.)

TA: ii don’t under2tand why you’re making a fu22 about thii2. ii thought you wanted to 2ee me.

AA: 0f c0urse i want t0 see y0u s0llux! i just d0n’t think n0w is a g00d time. the ge0blasta are in bl00m. wait a quarter perigee. it will be much safer.

TA: ii don’t get what the biig deal ii2.

AA: maybe it w0uldn’t matter t0 y0u but I suspect that it w0uld.

TA: 2tiill not getting iit.

AA has sent you sch00lfeedf0rwiggler2.ath

TA: you know all the wiildliife 2choolfeed2 make me fall a2leep. you 2end them to me when you thiink iive been up 2 long.

AA: suit y0urself. but be sure t0 pack plenty 0f water t0 drink. and message me when you’re d0ne. i’d rec0mmend a gasmask t00 but I kn0w y0u w0nt.

*

**Sollux: Bee Stupid.**

You’re flying to see AA, still trying to figure out what the big deal is when you find yourself going off course over the jungle. You correct yourself and fly on, correct yourself, correct yourself…

By the time you realize something is wrong, it’s really too late. The last thing you remember for a while is the scent. Deep, rich, musky, and oh so alluring. The last thing you remember is the scent and an impression of horns, fairly short, and skin, soft but tough, and you tumble out of the air and into the embrace of something that doesn’t let go and you don’t even struggle.

You wake up feeling a bit like death warmed over. Scrapped off a foot pod and left to dry in the desert sun. Your bulges feel chafed and your glasses are covered in something sticky and dusty and strongly scented. Your nook is insisting that you want to find someone to pay you some attention there. You groan and tell yourself to fuck off because you didn’t think it was possible for your bulges to still be attached and hurt this much. The sticky dust is all over you and you’re missing your pants and shoes. You have a headache. You decaptchalogue your palmtop and check the time. You’re missing two nights. There’s a message from AA.

AA: s0llux message me when y0u’re awake. i need t0 kn0w that y0u’re alive and suffering and n0t dead.

She says the nicest things. Then again, you’re two nights late, you can spare her a half sentence.

TA: not dead, just wii2hiing ii wa2.

You’re ready to turn off you palmtop and die in a miserable puddle of jizz-sweat-dust-jungle-rot but she replies too fast for you to indulge in dramatics.

AA: speaking as b0th a dedicated sch0lar of t0mb r0bbing and as a c0ncerned m0irailsprit h0w d0es it feel t0 have j0ined the great circle 0f life?

WTF?

TA: ii 2tiill don’t know who 2liipped me a miickey iin the miiddle of the jungle, but iif ii fiind them ii’m goiing to 2liip them 2ome la2er2.

AA: s0mething.

TA: 2omethiing what?

Bee-sus, why do you feel so slow? Are you even speaking the same language?

AA: n0t wh0. what. n0t s0me0ne. s0mething. s0llux y0u can’t p0ssibly be this sl0w. drink y0ur water. y0u’re clearly dehydrated.

You drink your water. It tastes indescribably good and you drain two bottles of it and want more but your stomach kind of hurts with the sudden influx. You’re still ass naked on a giant flower. A giant troll-gray flower with two very familiar tri-colored not-horns. There’s a trail of yellow pollen on it that matches the pollen all over you. Okay, you really _are_ slow. Suddenly the flashes of memory from last night, the last two nights, make a bit more sense. Still not a lot, but you have a sinking feeling you understand what happened, more or less. Apiary-lares, just let you die of humiliation now.

Blissfully buzzed Sollux flitted from the embrace of one stranger to another all night long and slept through the day in the embrace of another stranger, then repeated it the next night because Sollux never learns at one lesson if he can drag it out to two instead. All of the very alluring strangers had the same ‘horns’, and oh beespit you never thought your perversion for twins would come back to bite you so hard. You’re missing time and covered in pollen and your own slurry because some inexplicably _not_ troll-eating giant flower convinced you to try to sex it up. And all its neighbors. You feel so _dirty_ and they didn’t even fill a bucket for you in turn. Some spade fling, giant flowers, you fail.

Fuck, how stupid are you? You drink another half a bottle of water and piss off the edge of the flower. You wipe at the pollen and it’s so sticky it just smears. You use the other half of the bottle to rinse your aching and sticky bulges a bit, prod at them until they reluctantly retract. It hurts. They’re swollen and even sheathed you feel like they’re still out because there’s no way that there could be that many surfaces that hurt if they _weren’t_ dangling in the wind.

You tentatively prod at your psionics and are surprised to find that it doesn’t cause you a headache. You find a forgotten bag of grubcorn in your sylladex and devour it with another bottle of water waiting for the sun to go down. As the light changes through noon and afternoon, you reluctantly duck back down into the flower for protection. Damn these things are huge. The minute the sun’s mostly unlikely to crisp you, you launch and aim straight for Aradia’s hive, gaining altitude quickly and pushing yourself until it hurts to breathe and you back down a bit. The colder air feels better on your chafed parts and maybe if your freeze your bone bulge you can forget this latest stupidity. You get to Aradia’s hive in just under an hour instead of two and you skid to a landing panting.

Aradia is a troll-saint. She’s got a bath ready and she has pants and a spare shirt for you. Blessed Aradia. Why are there no troll religions to worship you? She’s wearing a gasmask, but she offers to wash your hair and back.

Once you’re ensconced in the tub she tells you everything you never wanted to know, but could really have used in advance as a _not_ -obscure warning about geoblasta season.

Dammit Aradia. Just because the damn flowers are part of some dead troll religion and their rites doesn’t mean you should use your moirail/maybe-matesprit to get a modern secondhand account of the experience. Even if it really is only active once per troll. Even if it only works on some trolls. Lucky you, you just happen to be one of the susceptible ones. So what if the allomones cue your body up to no longer be enticing to every last predator or disease-bearing insect in the jungle? You wouldn’t have been _in_ the jungle if the scent hadn’t lured you down.

You find an un-scrubbed patch of pollen and smear it in her hair. Behind the clear shield portion of the gasmask, her eyes widen and you briefly feel like a clod of shit on a shoe again. She pulls the mask off and takes a deep and deliberate breath. Your breath catches as you see her pupils spin wide. She pushes you back into the tub and climbs in, weight reassuring and alluring, rumblespheres soft and muscles solid and more _real_ than anything from the past two nights.

She pulls you close by the horns and kisses you, warm, wet, real. Your bulges stir and you wince. She squeezes your horns and the world fades just a bit, just right. Your bulges settle. How does she do that? It doesn’t work when you do it. You feel something stir against your stomach, the wet material of her skirt rippling.

“Is this alright?” She softens her grip on your horns so that the world fades back into focus, not all the way, but mostly. Just as much as you can deal with and no more. Just right. It still feels like she’s holding you all over. It feels like there’s a third hand on your stomach, rubbing in circles, soothing, but also calling up a heat deeper inside. You feel the wiggle of her bulge against you, less deliberate than the psionically provided third “hand”.

“Fuck, yeth,” you manage, and you tilt your head back until her hands are cushioning your head against the wall and she can start to edge her way into you. A fourth “hand” rubs at the lips of your nook, thumbs at the edge of your joining, and everything’s perfect, balanced again. She kisses your outstretched neck and nibbles, leaves a pattern of hickeys and teeth imprints. For the first time, you don’t even regret that there’s no one else to see them later, no one whose sniff nub you can get all out of joint with the perversion of your quadrant smearing.

She fills you up, slowly, carefully, in a way that aches just right and doesn’t push your bulges out and you realize that this is probably how you managed to fuck for two nights and still feel uncompleted. Not that you want to shove _anything_ growing in the jungle up your nook, who knows what fungi would grow.

Stupid flowers. Stupid Sollux. Stupid, lovely, perfect Aradia.

 _Eeeeeehhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm_. Right there. Lovely, lovely, _perfect_ Aradia.

If you’re drooling on yourself, well, you can’t really top how embarrassing you’ve already been, so whatever.

*

Aftermath: It’s not like you knew that two nights of stupidity and embarrassing cross-kingdom pseudocopulation would make biowires _afraid_ of you. Your bees, however, think that you smell fabulous and have never been more cooperative or solicitous. Maybe those dead religious guys were _onto_ something.


	7. Frenemies stands for Frustrated: TrollstuckJohn & Karkat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> minifill: request for trollbits specific to quadrants resulting in inappropriate flaring of hatey-grublegs
> 
> ...TrollstuckJohn is having some difficulty adjusting. Karkat is happiest when he has something to bitch about.

"Jebus, you embarrassing pile of bucket scrapings, put those things away and stop soliciting people in the street!"  
  
"What? Karkat, no! I just think it's cool I can carry more bags and still keep my hands free!"  
  
"Being a seadweller is utterly wasted on you. You'd rather be a lowblood psionic and able to fly and carry luggage, even if some engineer came along and said, 'Hello small wiggler, we have candy, get in our suspiciously blacked-out scuttlebuggy.' Alternative you would go."  
  
"This me would go too, Karkat! That doesn't sound like the kind of people who should own scuttlebuggies or be out luring wigglers, and someone should do something about it!"  
  
"I give up. If anyone asks, I don't know you."   
  
"Chin up, Beepbeep, you've never given up on anything in your life."  
  
"You don't know what 'chin up' means either, do you?"  
  
"What now?!"  
  
"Did you just flare your grublegs at me?! I told you to put those things away, Egbert!"  
  
"I don't think I like troll feelings, Karkat. I really don't."  
  
"Put your pale feelers away, John. No one here wants to tenderly caress your cranial oddities."   
  
(Sadface!John)  
  
"Oh for the love of the mothergrub! Put your bits away and carry your bags in your off hand, we can have happy wiggler explanatoriam time later."  
  
"Sure, Karkat!"  
  
(grumble. grumble. much put upon.)  
  
"Say, Karkat, at what point are we allowed to turn around and tell those guys following us that they're really obvious and also we don't want to be followed?"  
  
"When we're far enough away that we can see any reinforcements coming. Which is in about another three standard units of communal hive building. So put your bits away before some douche claws your feelers off. If I have to drag your carcass hiveward, I'm leaving all your bags."  
  
"Aww, but cheesy grubcurls! And the nookworm farm! You're going to rain all over my parade of entrepreneurial trollgrit?!"  
  
"I have news for you John. Nookworm farms never work. Never. Either they all die, or some subadult kicks it trying out the suspiciously odd looking survivors."  
  
"My dreams are dead now. They will haunt you."  
  
"Woe. This is me, being sympathetic, but not pale. Observe. No pale feelers rising like opportunistic anemones from forth my head hair. No rumblesphere resonance to induce a corresponding reply. No come-hither-and-pile pheromones. Also, no deliberate cuing of vulnerable areas, like the neck or inner wrists. No, sideways come-alongs to open negotiations between opposing parties. And absolutely nothing flaring and no threatening horn motions. Shut up. You are not allowed to say anything about my horns."  
  
"This is me. Shutting up."  
  
"No, that is you, cruising for an educational beatdown."  
  
"Nah, but I see some candidates if you're looking for an audience. You want tall and spindly, three-horns, or one of the three tiny tanks?"  
  
"Why should I bother? They're tracking your cullbait ass."  
  
"Because you'll feel better! Oh, wait... You'll eel betta!"  
  
"John?"  
  
"Karkat?~"  
  
"Shut up and start on the short ones. I feel like cutting someone down to size."


	8. It Came From The Tomato Patch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A miscalculation regarding the relative scale of the native wildlife and the invasion force. Or was it?

Something has been eating your tomatoes again. You scoop a few slugs off of your cabbages and dump them to their beery doom in the container you keep for the purpose, shove it back under the vegetable growth. Sometimes Bec will wander in for a sip and trek back out wobbling. Dogs have no head for beer. (Then again, neither does Dave. The six pack of Bud in the garage is reserved for two purposes: drowning slugs in the garden and being sufficiently shitty as to serve Dave right when he visits unannounced or late, as usual.)  
  
You give your tomato plants a little shake and there's a squeak and a plop. You look closer and a caterpillar glares back at you.   
  
_A caterpillar is glaring at you_.   
  
This is something you never thought to think.   
  
It's fat as a green hornworm but only half as long, bright red with a darker head, and its tiny face almost looks human. You've never see anything like it. You give an involuntary aww and gently pick it up.   
  
It squeaks and bites you, just barely making it through the skin and slurping at the result. Huh. You look at the fat little thing in your palm and it looks back at you, your blood on its mouth. It rears and shakes its front feet at you, managing a tiny screech, formidable for its size, but still... tiny. It glares at you.   
  
Freaking adorable.   
  
You check the bottom of the tomato plant and find half a freshly dead hornworm. Cute caterpillar, best pest eliminator. You dump Tiny-Vicious-And-Adorable back onto the tomato plant and find it another hornworm. Little Red slays it quickly and munches down perhaps half its own bodyweight in tomato pest. You hope, whatever it is, it's not the newest front on a dangerous invasive species.

It's certainly dangerously _cute_.   
  
You might, possibly, check on it every morning, fetch it more hornworms and bits of dog kibble and slivers of cooked chicken. It starts to purr when it sees you coming, and soon it shuffles up the closest branches or vines to meet you, will crawl onto your hand or arm or shoulder and just hang out, seeming to enjoy your company. It doesn't bite you again. Its skin is as soft as it looks, caterpillar soft, but also velvety. Its head is covered in longer velvet, like a tiny cap of hair, also soft and not at all like caterpillar bristles, which rightly ought to be irritating. It doesn't threat-display at you again, though it certainly has definite opinions on food, seems to expect ample praise at its hunting prowess, which you provide. It seems to listen to you, lets you pet it and coo at it, and it makes little squeaks and chirps back at you, often in the same tones as your conversation. Bec finds it fascinating while it finds Bec understandably terrifying. You put up temporary fencing around the garden to keep Bec out.   
  
By August Little Red weighs about as much as one of your plum tomatoes and you haven't lost another pepper, eggplant, or tomato in a month. Your squash are bountiful. Your herbs are exuberant.

Your tiny garden warrior eagerly eats whatever protein you bring it, having hunted your garden clean. There aren't even any slugs left. It herded all the snails into a potted container of dill and kept them there until you took them elsewhere. Snail shells being impervious to its tiny but efficacious teeth, its expression indicated that it took this affront personally.   
  
In mid-August it spins a cocoon on one of your bell pepper plants and you very carefully wrap the resulting mass in netting so an opportunistic bird doesn't get to it. You check the little cocoon every morning, wondering if it will be a butterfly or a moth, or something else entirely.   
  
You haven't been able to find anything on it online, not scientifically at least, though a lot of people with whom you've talked gardening at the town dump have had similar oddities. Jane has three in her garden, with the same body shape and voracious insectivorous appetite, but in different colors. Roxy's got two in her pond. They've both named theirs, so you don't feel weird that "it" became "Here, Kitty Kitty" and "Cutie Pie Grumpy Face".   
  
The cocoon cracks open after almost three weeks, while you're drinking your morning coffee, admiring your ambitious zucchini, and talking to your now silent gardening buddy. Out tumbles a tiny wet gray body, and you catch it just in time, letting your coffee tumble the other way. The tiny figure looks up at you, and it is nothing like a butterfly, not at all, but its face is familiar grumpy caterpillar.  
  
"Jade," pronounces the tiny alien creature, little orange nubs where you had expected antennae, tiny hands grasping you thumb, tiny feet pressing into your hands.  
  
You feel like your heart might explode out of your chest, ribs insufficient to contain the surge of joy and protectiveness you feel. Maybe it is a fairy after all, and you under its spell. You feel like you felt when Bec learned his name and started to look to you as the center of his world. You suppose that "Kitten" may no longer be appropriate, though Thumbelina doesn't sound any better.   
  
"Jade, I'm _hungry_." Those eyes are every bit as devastatingly compelling as before.   
  
There's really nothing else you can do then, right?  
  
You take not-Kitten inside for some hard-earned breakfast. Three weeks is a long time to fast while doing so much work.  
  
Then you call Jane and Roxy, tiny weight on your shoulder eyeing the phone suspiciously, stuffing its little face with chicken and leaving tiny greasy hand-prints on your tee-shirt, your ear, your hair.  
  
When you get to the point of names, your tiny garden warrior has his-her-their own ideas, complete with me-Tarzan moment.   
  
"Jade," not-Kitten states, pointing at you. "Karrrrrrrkttt," accompanies a tiny thumb facing back towards the speaker, emphatic.   
  
"Aww," says Roxy, on speakerphone. "Mine don't talk yet."  
  
"Take a blessing while you can," Jane retorts, "Two of mine only swear." Jane has a face like a saintly nun and a mouth like a sailor. She is one of your very best friends, there through thick and thin, just like Roxy, and has pity-baked for you multiple times when the occasion called for homemade and your best was inexplicably disastrous.   
  
"Motherfuck!" chimes a distant tiny joyous voice down the line in Jane's direction.   
  
You glance at your tiny shoulder companion.   
  
Karkat looks back, tiny smile spreading across a very devilish expression.   
  
"Fuck!" 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alas for Bec, the worst is yet to come. Karkat will learn... " _BAD DOG_ ".


	9. How to Pill a Helmstroll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some Poor Bastard Has To Pill The Helmstroll

_The Dreaded Earworm_ is in port for a week because some failure brought a virulent strand of respiratory whooping clown back from the last shore leave and the entire crew, including the helmstroll, caught it. Joke’s on you though, because while the initial disease vector got culled, a rarity on the laxly run _Earworm_ , it’s the helmstechs that have to medicate the helm. And Lariis has always been touchy about medical procedures. Not that you blame her, most of your coworkers have brine-preserved haunch meats for hands and brains. 

You arrive fifteen minutes early for your shift, not because you’re a desperate overachiever, but because last shift should have just pilled Lariis and if you’re not here to “remind” them, they might oops just long enough to make it your problem. It would appear that despite their incompetence, they’ve managed to pull one over you. Again. Second class technician Xihynt is already gone.

Third class technician Ixiann staggers out of the helmblock looking frazzled and smelling just faintly of burnt keratin. He salutes, which shows he’s pretty fried since he usually sullenly shuffles aside just far enough to let you by and make it clear that he doesn’t respect you or your measly half rank on him. Shit for brains. You didn’t get your rank fellating superiors, you got it being competent at your job and refusing to play games like that. It won’t get him culled, not on this ship, but it’s not going to help him climb any higher. He staggers off and when he slaps the wall to catch his balance, he leaves half a handprint in blood behind.

You enter the helmsblock, survey the sooty walls and extinguish the burning remains of the medislug packaging by dumping them into a container you can seal. The lack of oxygen does the rest. You cue up ventilation instead of asking Lariis to do it, add a data entry for the incident to explain the briefly elevated carbon monoxide and airborne particulate matter readings. You don’t bother to tag Ixiann for incompetence. In the long run, he’ll either shape up or the data logs will tell the story. You deposit your smuggled bottle and box on the counter that no longer holds a quarter perigee pack of psionic-friendly medislugs. You made sure to attribute their loss to Ixiann as the specialty ones cost well more than they ought and will be coming out of someone’s pay. Idiot. He should have only removed the one he was to administer, not the rest of the mostly-full quarter perigee supply.

Thankfully for you, you won’t have to go back to the controlled substances cabinet on the other end of the ship because one of the medislugs made a break for it and survived. You pluck it up between two disdainful fingertips. Proper claw maintenance is vital, it allows you this briefest of distances, or the illusion at least, between the stupidity of so many of your shipmates and the sinking feeling that sooner or later they will pull you down to their level. You keep yourself well-groomed, your uniform crisp. It is a layer of civilization when so much can devolve quickly in the black.

You turn back to the helmscolumn and its peeved inhabitant.

“Easy or hard way?,” you ask, hoisting the medislug with a grimace. They taste horrible. This you know because you, like the rest of the crew, were on the same regimen last quarter perigee. Lariis was the last to fall ill, and if no one died, well, no one wants to risk it when the helm’s coughing so hard the biowires shake.

Lariis narrows her eyes at you.

“What are you offering?”

“I’ve got the first four episodes of _In Which Incompetence Defeats Temporary Pail Partnering, Resulting In Amusing Drone Footage_. And if you manage to swallow without chewing it, I have your choice of Faygo or sugar grubs to get the taste out.” It doesn’t matter if she does chew it, but the taste is even worse if she does. You don’t tell her that the sugary junk is hers either way. You need your stash, whatever its source, to last at least the rest of the quarter perigee.

“No one else tries to bribe me.”

“Please. It’s not bribery. It’s negotiation. And I stole the suger grubs.”

*

Sweeps later, you’re still stuck on the _Earworm_ , but at least the ship likes you, which is more than anyone else can truthfully say.

*


	10. Red Tide: How Signless & Young Jade Harley Saved Us All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from various comment/conversations: noisy red family-based amphibious assault force. (So many red seadwellers.)  
> The Signless's rebellions succeeds, thanks to the native peoples of the Alternian Empire's latest *attempted* conquest.  
> OC POV

From _The Peoples’ History: A Collection of Significant Photojournalism of the 21 st Century  
_Foreword, to accompany the cover still, by Tanish B. Reid, journalist and witness

 *

The iconic image of the armistice, not the most shocking of the many individual human-troll interactions, or the most contemporaneously publicized, but the one that became our central idea of the dawning of a new era was neither scripted nor taken in a moment of extreme human or troll pathos.

I want to state that it was unscripted, because I was there and even the best photojournalism can’t convey the taste of fear and cautious hope in the air, how a hot dry day in Jamaica can be evident even when the sun is still rising, how the moment of re-contact was flavored with the scent of sea, coffee, Ariel laundry detergent, nervous sweat, the cracks of yawning jaws and nervous shifting.

The cameras, however numerous, did not show how of all of us, brass in their uniforms, guards in theirs, journalists in careful business casual, myself in much the same, then an intern ferrying coffee, we greatly outnumbered the one child among us, but when the Signless and his people emerged from the waves, unarmed, they only ever looked to her first.

Our nervous sweat, the guards’ guns, our suspicions, were all noticed, weighed, deemed lighter in consequence that the presence of a child, our child. We didn’t understand then, but the meeting could have gone very differently, or rather, exactly as we had feared. The Signless was honest in his invitation to meet, but what sealed the day from potential violence was a sign we didn’t even realize we had given.

Or perhaps Admiral Harley did know. I can’t tell you his thoughts on the matter, nor many others. Those of us there from the first, we all became swept up in the resulting work, regardless, in many ways, of our prior duties or the differentiations of hierarchy, and I and many others grew familiar with Admiral Harley as more than just a figure of authority. I can tell you with certainty, and fondness, that he was a good man. I will have to leave it to other historians to detail the working of his mind. He didn’t live past that first year, but he saw the negotiations through their most important first phases, saw the enemy divided into "us and them”, “them” whittling to us or gone with a minimum of casualties on all sides, and there were many sides, many competing interests, and he saw the custodianship of his granddaughter properly transferred before he passed. He was a charming man, and many thoughts might have been well hidden behind his jovial smile and neatly trimmed white mustache. I often wondered in the ensuing years of struggle, if he might have had more “lucky guesses” to aid us all.

But we are not speaking of might-have-beens, but of what happened.

The iconic image of the beginning of the era of cooperation, of deliberate understanding chosen over fear and revenge, was a still taken from the live broadcasting footage, the huge form of the Signless swinging the tiny form of an admiral’s granddaughter up above his head, alien smile to her own, his torso and neck and lower limbs explicitly open to attack from itchy-fingered human guards viewable in the edges of the image, his own attendants, _family_ , as we would learn, each emptyhanded, open palms visible, then-alien faces a mix of concern and careful blankness.

The tiny girl, now a young woman of her own accomplishment, hangs, suspended against the sky, forever suspended in our minds, the darkness of her skin and hair a crisp silhouetted form against an open cloudless sky, the swing of her beaded braids revealing the sudden arc of her flight, the white of her teeth, the happy child's joy of her flight, all jarring, all beautiful, all reminding us of why we fought, why we so badly wanted to stop, why it was so difficult to set aside what we had already lost. Her feet are bare, tiny sandals buried somewhere in beach sand out of view, and if you look closely you can see the flight of sand from her perfect tiny spread toes.

What happens next is not an unhappy ending, alien warrior to delicate child, alien leader with another leader's hostage kin. In the moments that follow, the imposing figure swings the little girl down, but not so far down as the ground. He tucks her over his hip, her curious hands clearly contrasting against the crimson slash of his gills, his arm behind her back. He holds her securely, carefully, as casually as any parent, and if you were born since, you cannot know how odd it was that it seemed right. She swings her feet and the glitter of sand sticks to his wet clothing, the armored bodystocking stripped of the Empire’s symbol. Her eyes are still on his, and they are both still smiling.

Can you feel it? Have you ever held a child? The weight of her, the aliveness, the shift to your own body to hold her close, how your own center of gravity is changed, how she holds back?

“ _Oh_ ,” we thought, watching the footage live, collectively, in that place that fears the night and finds beauty in babies, however scrunched their faces first are, that primordial collective unconsciousness. I can tell you now that that was when we all first exhaled, those there, and those watching. I have discussed it since with many, and _that_ was universal.

“ _They hold their children as we hold our own_.” 

No, we humans learned, though it took time, that wasn’t quite correct. The Reds, front-liners, battle-scarred and intended for short, vicious lives on strings of alien worlds, our own only a waystation, forbidden children of their own descent, found, and find, family wherever they go, among themselves, or elsewhere. They consider our children _as their own_. And the Alternian Empire, treating them with all the distain and casual maintenance of attack dogs, allowed it, so far as they understood it, because it kept their front-liners docile, and gave their masters leverage.

They had attacked us, had attacked infrastructure, had terrified us, all under orders, and it had humiliated many of those who should have protected us that the worse fallout was not from attacks but from our own reactions.

How many disasters would have been averted if we had treated “our own” as our own, and not marked maps with “lost” or “tactically insignificant”? The Reds do not burn crops or poison water. They consider both tactics of Alternia’s self-proclaimed elite and thus both below them and a sign of mental illness. If one among them violates this, they are the first to end the violation, and often the violator. I was in Kingston, I know the desperation of the water shortages. So too do I know now that Alternian cities are sectioned into smaller areas and independently sustainable. They did not expect our unprepared state, and when they learned of it they expected us to scatter. We did not.

In truth, the first wave didn’t understand us any more than we understood them.

We shared no language. Their people had space travel, had psionic powers far outside the reach of any spoon bending we might have acknowledged as possible. But the people that landed on Earth, the invasion force, were the disenfranchised of the Alternian Empire. They were homeless and futureless. They envied us, not as individuals, but as a collective, and they would have whittled at us as we whittled at them, and soon enough we all would have hated each other past all reconciliation were it not for the Signless. They would have taken some portion of our children with them to the stars and they would have left their dead behind, and perhaps some distant descendants of our survivors would be piecing together what happened while the vast machinery of the Alternian Empire ground its way through more systems, as it had for millennia.

Please stop for a moment and think. We were not the first. We were not the first to be attacked, to watch our power grids go down, nor the first to be assimilated in ones and twos. But we were the first to answer the call as a people, as still cohesive societies.

We risked a great deal to do so, and there are those who would tell you that that we were wrong and we should have fought to the last. These are the same people who hold the carapacians as the poster children of Troll Victimization but cannot stomach refugees of any race. Be wary of the people that want you to be afraid. They are not your allies. Whether they are politicians or those who raised you, you are your own. You enter the world free of debt and you incur debt only in action or inaction. You owe them _nothing_ but fear-mongers will tell you that you do. Here is what I want you to ask when someone next tries: “But what are they afraid of?”.

You can pretty that up if you like.

If you cannot stand firm and certain, and I can sympathize well with finding your own determinations being a long and arduous process, break it down. _Who wants what and why?_ Someone managed this, on both sides, and because of that you and I are here now to exchange these thoughts, or perhaps one day meet, and we would not be if fear had ruled.

Naturally at an advantage at night or in the water, trolls had swiftly become both the enemy and the boogieman. We counted each missing child with the dead and we tallied each with regret, and, for those outside the personal tragedy of it, a certain relish. _This is the enemy, see how their evil flourishes_. Teenagers, sojourning in their own alien lands between childhood and adulthood, were not exempt from the danger, we thought. We had curfews and pronouncements, and we never expected to find that we had not lost quite so much as we had thought. With the armistice came shared information, and those places most fiercely defended proved not to hold weapons, but adoptees. Not hostages, though the agreements allowed for more careful translations, more freedom to leave, or stay by choice. It humbled some of us, and made others angry. It became apparent that we had barely missed killing our own in retaliation for their assumed deaths. Not everyone wanted to go home. Not everyone had a home to which they might return. Our first translators might have been labeled defectors if the fear-mongers had succeeded. We would have re-cut our cultures to fit entrenched war and survival and lost so much. An open hand struck a greater blow against the Alternian Empire than any number of clenched fists. In the years since, we have helped one another, our strengths, by their differences, compatible, a whole greater than the sum of their parts.

Of all the trolls, the one caste that bled red was the one caste that would stand with humans against the ever-hungry expansion of a caste-declared queen.

And in our alliance, red-bloods, all of us, humans partially immune to the enslavement of troll telepaths, we won our mutual freedom, and even that of those who did not fight with us.

Outside our solar system, humans venture at our own peril, or that of their extended families’ as all sentients do, but on earth, trolls police their own, and children, _how we did not understand their own desperation, their hope_ , the children of Earth, mammalian and larval both, are _sacred_.

If you were born after, you have never known otherwise. For some of you, there’s little that would be different, but for others, and I say this with thankfulness that it is not so, _you would not be here_.

What I want to be sure you know is that troll or human, we saved each other. I want you to know about people who were afraid, and chose hope over fear, caution tempered with wild dreaming.

I want you to think about Signless as a person just like each of us, and not, for a moment, about the depth of his orator’s voice, or the solidity of his presence for the last three decades, but _of the courage it took to walk unarmed into our circle of lights and guns and expectations_. How he turned his back on security, however violent, how he risked all whom he loved, and how _each and every one_ of those who loved him did the same.

Close your eyes for a moment. You are never alone. Everything you do affects those who love you _and you have not met them all yet_.

I want you to remember that what we are isn’t what we may be, and that’s not a sentence, it’s a beautiful opportunity.

I want to give you a slice of that sunrise, a small ember for the pocket closest to your heart, and I want to tell you that it will not burn you, but that if it does, you will find someone to cover that vulnerability and you will do the same for them. Each of us is a small system, spinning through the galaxy, _becoming_.

We are strong. We turned back those who would enslave us. We are stronger. We embraced those who would have let it happen, and we struck their own chains from them.

 

Tanish B. Reid  
Human, adopted to Clans Scrivenbeast and Open-Hands-Sheathed-Claws  
In the year 2025 AD of Earth

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [It Came From The Strawberry Patch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7299892) by [cthchewy (pyrrhic_victoly)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victoly/pseuds/cthchewy)




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